I wrote that I was about to deliver "Two somewhat arbitrary assertions, with no great back-up corroboration."
The first assertion was this: "(1) An artist's or critic's "explanation" may lead to greater "understanding" of sorts, and "admiration" in a contemplator, but never to an "aesthetic experience" -- except of a bogus sort." Whereupon Michael pounced: "Are you saying that someone can experience at least two sorts of aesthetic experience, the bogus and the non-bogus? Explain that, please. Explain what you have in mind when you say bogus a. experience, and by inference, the non-bogus a. experience." He then quotes my description of a "bogus a. experience": "like the shallow awe that arose in the minds of young readers of Eliot's "The Wasteland" a couple of generations ago when they read the "Notes" to the poem." Aw shoot, man, it's Sunday, and I said I didn't want to corroborate anything, I just wanted to run off at the mouth in a relaxed Sunday kind of way. But okay, here's what I had in mind. I remember when I was a kid, from about eight till nineteen, I was much of the time an enormous phony, and there was no one I was more a phony with than with myself. When I read those "Notes" to "The Wasteland", I was knocked out by all this what I took to be palpable confirmation of the poem's (and the poet's) "art". I remember writing some short fiction at the time, and putting lots of footnotes in it, and cooing over my own "art". In fact I now think the "Wasteland" notes are bullshit, not impossibly a very conscious gimmic dreamed up by Eliot or Pound. Still, at the time they awed me, and convinced me I was in the company of "artistic greatness". The experience was memorable, august, I thought, the sort of thing that grips great minds -- which I wanted to pretend to myself I had. In fact, however, it happened long before I ever derived from a poem an experience that I have since called "aesthetic". There must be others on this list who can recall some time in their youth when they were conned by cathedral-grand trappings into feeling they were in the presence of greatness. As a kid, I didn't have the right stuff of the kid who could see and say the emperor was bare-ass. In sum, what I may have thought of as an "a.e." back then I would now call something else. Pseudo aesthetic. Bogus. Michael continued to come after me. But I'll save that for another posting. ************** Worried about job security? Check out the 5 safest jobs in a recession. (http://jobs.aol.com/gallery/growing-job-industries?ncid=emlcntuscare00000002)
